Intelligent Alien Life Could be Found by 2040: US Scientist

Humans will be able to detect intelligent outer space life within the next 25 years, US scientist, Seth Shostak has predicted.

UFO with Alien Head Protruding out Spotted on Google Earth Map (Representational Image)REUTERS/HANDOUT

Humans will be able to detect intelligent outer space life within the next 25 years, US scientist, Seth Shostak of the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute in Mountain View, California has predicted.

By 2040, astronomers would discover enough star system in the universe that will give them a hint of electromagnetic signals produced by aliens, claimed Shostak.

"I think we'll find E.T. within two dozen years using these sorts of experiments," Shostak said during a talk at the 2014 NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) symposium held at Stanford University, US, on 6 February.

The prediction is partly based on NASA's Kepler space telescope that shows that the Milky Way is likely to support life in the near future.

"The bottom line is, like one in five stars has at least one planet where life might spring up. That's a fantastically large percentage. That means in our galaxy, there's on the order of tens of billions of Earth-like worlds", he added.

As the human civilization has the ability to send electromagnetic signals out into the cosmos every second, Shostak and his colleagues believe that at least some of these world's intelligent aliens have developed the same.

The search for extraterrestrial existence began in 1960, when Frank Drake, a pioneer astronomer examined two sun-like stars with 26 meters West Virginia antenna. Over the past years, the hunt has rolled up considerably with the advancement of digital technology and electronics. However, getting enough funding to continuously keep examining the skies has been a constant problem.

The search for alien life doesn't completely depend on technology. The hunt for alien life is a three-way race as defined by Shostak. Some researchers are looking for simple life forms, intelligent or advanced civilizations, some hunting the solar system such as Mars and Jupiter's Europa (moon) for simple organisms and others focusing on signs of microbial life such as NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, which is expected to launch in 2018.